JupiterResearch: RSS Adoption Not Really Simple

March 21, 2005

Rok Hrastnik from Market Studies pinged me this morning with this article from DMNews. JupiterResearch polled a number of marketers about RSS and it's marketing implications. I think Rok forwarded it to me because he knew I couldn't just read it without offering my opinion. Before I get started, Rok has his thoughts on the survey.

Here we go:
1. Insert "email marketing" where they mention RSS and go back 10-12 years. I am sure JupiterResearch did a similar survey asking marketers about including interactive advertising and email in their marketing plans. A very small universe of marketers were trying it (maybe 6%). I remember trying to convince my CEO to test email. I had to build models and justify the cost. We ended up spending about 80% of our budget with email and email newsletters. Yes, RSS adoption is small. Email did not have billions of people using it on day one either.

2. "However, RSS publishing still faces many hurdles: measuring traffic at least on a subscriber level is nearly impossible to do, which will relegate RSS to a broadcast marketing tool in the near term." Pheedo has solved these issues and will continue to innovate.

3. "RSS is not well suited to promotional-offer-oriented content because it does not offer the targeting and personalization capabilities of e-mail, the report said." This statement is simple not true. In many cases, we have cut our customer's cost-per-acquisition by over 50%.

Bottom line is I am not surprised by the survey results nor worried. RSS will continue to grow. Consumers will adopt it. It will take time but email adoption was not built in a day either.

Read A sound case to include Blogs and RSS in your marketing mix to understand how RSS can positively impact your marketing efforts.

Posted by Bill Flitter on March 21, 2005 9:42 PM
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